For the CS New Faculty Teaching Workshop to have the scale of impact we envision, we had to think carefully about strategic audience targeting. We ultimately want to help teaching across all computer science undergraduate departments address today’s challenges. But we are starting with the re-search-intensive universities because they serve as models nationally. The top research institutions simply have inordinate influence in the rest of the computer science education ecosystem. Literally, a handful of schools produce most of the Ph.D.’s who go on to be computer science faculty in the U.S.e These newly hired faculty will also go on to hold positions of leadership and influence within their departments and schools, magnifying the impact of the cohort we directly touch each year. As we influence enough faculty that they form a critical mass at each of their home departments, they will have local peer support. With an orientation toward a scholarly view of teaching, we equip them with today’s known best practices, and with an inclination to follow future scholarly advances in teaching for tomorrow’s challenges.

Changing ingrained teaching practices can be difficult. After all, we succeeded through years of our own student experiences, so we see ourselves as experts. This model of offering new research faculty workshops has been effective in other disciplines. The Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop has been successful in effecting change by reaching approximately 25% of new hires—and at least half of those who attended the workshop reporting adoption of evidence-based practices in their teaching after the workshop. 2 Moreover, participants and department chairs reported a change in culture based on discussions about teaching. Charles Henderson, who evaluated the workshop, suggests it was successful because it targeted new faculty in only a single discipline and presented a wide variety of pedagogical options for potential adoption. Everyone likes to make choices, and if you know more than one way to teach something, you get to make choices and improve your enjoyment of teaching.

e https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/
blog/2015-faculty-summit-informs-and-inspires/
faculty enjoyment of teaching, even in
these outsized conditions. To achieve
this goal of disseminating effective
teaching methods, we are implement-
ing a strategy that has been successful
in other academic disciplines—putting
newly hired faculty through a CS New
Faculty Teaching Workshop,d a rigor-
ous “boot camp” workshop on how to
be effective teachers.

Many universities offer some kind of orientation to teaching for new faculty. We are taking a page from other STEM disciplines in teaching a CS-spe-cific introduction for new faculty at research institutions. With the credibility that can only be obtained through being practicing CS faculty ourselves, attendees at the CS New Faculty Teaching Workshop learn methods that have been shown to work in CS classes. Examples are drawn from the specific CS courses and topics the attendees will teach in the coming year, using tools that are specific to the needs of CS homework and programming projects. We teach CS faculty how to succeed as CS faculty, without spending time adapting more general or maybe even inapplicable teaching strategies.

Addressing Challenges

To address the challenges in teaching computer science, our CS New Faculty Teaching Workshop has two long-term aspirations:

˲ Change practices in the classroom to be evidence-based, for the benefit of faculty and students.

˲Change faculty perceptions of teaching so they view it as a scholarly endeavor, leveraging their scientific thinking to continually grow and improve as instructors.

Adoption of evidence-based prac-
tices at scale in CS classes could have
profound outcomes. Other S TEM disci-
plines are reaping the benefits of active
learning. STEM students are learning
more and failing less in active learn-
ing classes compared to traditional
lectures. 1 Evidence-based teaching
practices in CS classes leads to bet-
ter performance on final exams5 and
increased retention of majors. 4 The
most common teaching practice in CS
remains an apprenticeship model—
we lecture and expect students to fig-
d http://bit.ly/New-CS-FTW
The second aspiration is to change
how CS faculty view education and
teaching. CS faculty frequently express
beliefs not only that programming is an
innate ability, but that good CS educa-
tors are “born, not made.” There is no
incentive for CS faculty to improve, to
learn to become better educators, if
they think their teaching ability is pre-
ordained. And yet, there are many tech-
niques shown by the CS education liter-
ature to improve teaching and student
outcomes. What we need is for faculty
to both value education as part of their
profession (we believe most do already!)
and for them to leverage the CS educa-
tion research literature as a source of
vetted ideas and ready solutions.

Strategy: Teach the New Faculty
to Influence the Future

New CS faculty going into research-intensive universities rarely have much teaching experience. They are hired because of their excellence in research and innovation. CS New Faculty Teaching Workshop attendees often have some anxiety about teaching. They want to do well at it but recognize the challenges they face in large classrooms with students from diverse cultural and programming backgrounds. These are exactly the faculty whom we want to develop and support. We want to give them the tools to be successful in the classroom; to be effective and efficient so they can succeed at both teaching and research. Because they have a strong desire to do right by their students, they are our starting point for developing a culture that values teaching and computing education research.

New CS faculty
going into research-
intensive universities
rarely have much
teaching experience.